1 business targetting multiple local locations
-
When researching a new client - I just came across a site in the same field which is ranking really well for all the local towns/cities/villages in the area.
Each page for each town is a duplicate only changing out the town name (which appears 13 times on the page) - all pics and videos are the same. His url structure is along the lines of:
budget-business-domain.com/budget-business-area/budget-business-town/
The domain was registered in 2012 - all backlinks are internal - anchor text is the same.
I think it shouldn't be working.... but it is
Why is this working?
-
Maybe I'll just wait to see what happens over the next few months in the SERPS.
The only social network I could find linking was 4 tweets & their 2 youtube videos, they don't have any Google+ or Facebook pages, no reviews and they don't appear in the local listing. The niche is very competitive
I just noticed that they do however use these Zemanta for what looks like related articles - which I am not familiar (so am just going to do a bit of research on them)
-
What about off-site factors? Do they have well optimised Google+ Local pages for their individual sites (linking to their respective location pages on their site?) What about citations? Do they appear in local and authoritative listings? Have they got any reviews?
How competitive is the niche?
-
Hi Tye
I think you are right, sites/pages like that shouldn't be doing so well, but there are still sites/pages out there that are going under the radar or trying to trick ranking well in SERPs.
I have seen that with a local business in my area too and for a while they were dominating every local search spreading over a 60+ mile radius. In recent months though I have seen their position eroded, maybe because Google got wise to what they were doing.
If you believe a site is spamming by mispractice, then you can file a report with Google to ask them to examine the site and what it is doing. See here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1
I hope that helps,
Peter
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Penguin 2.1 Penalty- Can't Understand why hit by it?
Hi, I have lost all my rankings after Penguin 2.1 update. I haven't did anything wrong. Want to know the root cause of the penalty so that I can overcome this. Any help would be appreciated. Website: http://tiny.cc/hfom4w
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chandman0 -
LOCAL SEO / Ranking for the difficult 'service areas' outside of the primary location?
It's generally not too hard to rank in Google Places and organically for your primary location. However if you are a service area business looking to rank for neighboring cities or service areas, Google makes this much tougher. Andrew Shotland mentions the obvious and not so obvious options: Service Area pages ranking organically, getting a real/virtual address, boost geo signals, and using zip codes instead of service area circle. But I am wondering if anyone had success with other methods? Maybe you have used geo-tagging in a creative way? This is a hurdle that many local business are struggling with and any experience or thoughts will be much appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vmialik1 -
Multiple Versions of Mobile Site
Hey Guys, We have recently finished the latest version of our mobile site which means currently we have 2 mobile sites. Depending on what device and Os will depend on which site you will be presented with.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seekjobs
e.g.
iPhone 3 or 4 users on iOS4 will get version 1 of our mobile site
iPhone 5 users on iOS5 will get the new version (version 2) of our mobile site. Our old mobile site is currently indexed in Google and performing pretty well.
Since the launch of the second mobile site we have not see any major changes to our visibility in Google and so was curious My main concern here is duplicate content so I am curious can Google detect that we have 2 mobile site that we serve depending on device? And if Google can detect this, why has our sites not been penalized! Thanks, LW I know the first thing that comes to your mind is Duplicate content0 -
Google penalty having bad sites maybe and working on 1 good site ?!!!
I have a list of websites that are not spam.. there are ok sites... just that I need to work on the conent again as the sites content might not be useful for users at 100%. There are not bad sites with spammy content... just that I want to rewrite some of the content to really make great websites... the goal would be to have great content to get natual links and a great user experience.. I have 40 sites... all travel sites related to different destinations around the world. I also have other sites that I haven't worked on for some time.. here are some sites: www.simplyparis.org
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sandyallain
www.simplymadrid.org
www.simplyrome.org etc... Again there are not spam sites but not as useful as they coul become... I want to work on few sites only to see how it goes.... will this penalise my sites that I am working on if I have other sites with average content or not as good ? I want to make great content good for link bait 🙂0 -
What happens when content on your website (and blog) is an exact match to multiple sites?
In general, I understand that having duplicate content on your website is a bad thing. But I see a lot of small businesses (specifically dentists in this example) who hire the same company to provide content to their site. They end up with the EXACT same content as other dentists. Here is a good example: http://www.hodnettortho.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.braces2000.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.gentledentalak.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth/ If you google the title of that blog article you find tons of the same article all over the place. So, overall, doesn't this make the content on these blogs irrelevant? Does this hurt the SEO on these sites at all? What is the value of having completely unique content on your site/blog vs having duplicate content like this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MorganPorter0 -
Local Listing Spam - Why is Google Missing this?
I have a competitor that ranks in Google Search for a Top Dollar Keyword in the organic rankings with the normal result, however just below that it shows another result that contains the Local City Name followed by their business name. In the URL they have domain.com > Local and below the description data it shows a map for a totally different location as this competitor only has one location... Once clicking on the link I found that it has everything in the title, description and h1 and body content in footer that talks about the local area but not their product. and when you click the breadcrumbs you can go back to a directory of all the other cities and states they are targeting with doorway pages with the same layout however the anchor text is cityname+keyword How are they getting away with this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ben-HPB0 -
Thought on optimising the perfect keyword location link
My site works a bit like a directory, so say I have a page called "Ice Cream Vendors" - on that page I would talk a bit about Ice Cream Vendors, then I will have a list of Ice Cream Vendor Locations. My list of locations can be quite big depending on the product and the amount of locations they occur in - when you click a location, it goes to a page showing all "ICeCream Vendors" in that location. So Currently I will have a table on the page a bit like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | James77
New York
Miami
Las Vegas This is all perfectly nice, simple and usable - BUT it is not producing perfect keyword links - for perfect keyword links the list should be like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York Ice Cream Vendors
Miami Ice Cream Vendors
Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Now I have my perfect anchor links - BUT it looks rediculous and is NOT user friendly. So What do I do?
1/. Build it for users and not have perfect anchor links, and loose in SEO?
2/. Build a perfect SEO links and make it less usable and looking spammy? OR 3/. Deliver the search engine the perfect SEO links, and the user the userfriendly version? In this I mean I could do the following:
SE's (and screen readers I think would see):
ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York Ice Cream Vendors
Miami Ice Cream Vendors
Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Users would See
ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York
Miami
Las Vegas Now in my view I am doing nothing wrong - I am mearly giving the user the most userfriendly version and I am giving the SE more information on the link, that the user doesn't need. So - In my view I am doing something that is honest - but what are your thoughts?? Has anyone tried to do this? Thanks0 -
How can I make use of multiple domains to aid my SEO efforts?
About an year, the business I work for purchased 20+ domains: sendmoneyfromcanada.com sendmoneyfromaustralia.com sendmoneyfromtheuk.com sendmoneyfromireland.com The list goes on, but you can get the main idea. They thought that the domains can be useful to aid http://www.transfermate.com/ . I can set up a few micro sites on them, but from that point there will be no one to maintain them. And I'm, honestly, not too happy with hosting multiple sites on one IP and having them all link to the flagship. It is spammy and it does not bring any value to end users. I might be missing something, so my question is - Can I use these domains to boost my rankings, while avoiding any shady/spammy techniques? P.S. I had this Idea of auctioning the domains in order to cover for the domain registration fees.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Svetoslav0